The point he made here is very accurate I think:

“It’s viewers who are scared of trying new talent, not commissioners. It’s viewers who nine times out of ten will choose a mediocre true crime or celebrity doc over a brilliantly made doc about almost anything else. It’s viewers who — overwhelmed with choice — are terrified to take risks on unfamiliar-looking new propositions.”

I am someone who does make an effort to try new things and even I constantly feel the pull to choose something mediocre in a "safe" genre I like (mystery, for example), rather than take a risk on a documentary or drama that is of much higher quality. Instead of challenging myself to learn more about the world or face some new/complex themes that I can reflect on, I'll choose some derivative slop and get halfway through before bailing.

Many of us have too much going on in our lives and feel so overwhelmed that screen time (TV/film/social media/gaming) has become this drug that we repeatedly go to so we don't have to think about and deal with our problems. It's like feeling guilty about your poor diet, but instead of actually taking a stand and planning your meals out, buying the ingredients and cooking for yourself, you just indefinitely delay it and continue the cycle of eating bad and feeling bad about eating bad. Screen-based entertainment has become a fast food for too many people; they are addicted to it, and the cognitive dissonance in the face of that fact is so strong that they'd rather blame someone else or ignore the problem than take some agency over their own lives.

One thing not brought up in this article is that YouTube and TikTok has content available NOW. And I don't just mean that traditional shows air once a week and I have to wait for it. I mean some shows are available so randomly it's hard to keep up.

The show is advertised as coming out on Tuesday, but when on Tuesday? Midnight? Midnight my time? Primetime? I had free time on Tuesday, but it wasn't available. Now I wake up on Wednesday and I see news articles all about it. Feels like I've missed it. Next thing I know the season is over and it's been cancelled.

Alf Lawrie, who spent almost six years looking after shows including The Great British Bake Off, Gogglebox and The Jury: Murder Trial,

Lmao.

Lol sure boomer, blame "users" instead of inproving what and how people watch your crap content. Maybe just maybe people are tired of your shit programmes and adverts uo the arse

Agreed.

But it’s complex. As an example, I have some (IMO) very bright family that tend to default to YouTube over TV simply because they’re exhausted from work, even though they’re huge TV and video game buffs.

Another sample size of one anecdote: this appears to be a trend in other media. For instance, in fanfic land, hardly anyone comments anymore, and short fluff/smut pieces or “prompt” anthologies get way more attention than the rarer long adventures (which used to be the other way around).

I’ve observed this with news as well (hence my old employer went under), video games, and even some academia.

Right .. it's the people who consume your content's fault. Not the network. Not the medium of which content is provided. Not the content that's provided...

"Why won't the people eat the cat shit we provide!? They're the problem!"

I'm going to agree with him. People have given up on intellectualism. And the algorithms are half to blame, but people also need to share responsibility. Lemmy is about as high-brow as I can find for social media, but I spend too much time on it myself also. So I am aware of how much a hypocrite I am

The fact that like 2/3 of the comments in this thread didn't read the article and therefore missed the point kind of proves the point.

https://archive.vn/GWwUs

if we're talking about it purely from a uk perspective, than internationalisation and americafication is to blame once us based streamers started pouring in.

I tend to think his complaints about the quality of the content are well founded, but (1) strip off the production values and TV/Movie people have been making plenty of lowest-common-denominator slop for decades, and (2) the popularity of YT/TT crap reveals more about how people always would have acted with the current options.

Cultural elites' gatekeeping the production and wide distribution of video content is a double-edged sword, but I'm always suspicious of anything that implies some huge cohort of people like "TV audiences" are inherently worse than they used to be.

The industry gets people addicted to fast slop content. This hurts non-fast slop content producers. So they blame the end user!?

Man these people need to get bent. Try blaming the people who created this in the first place.

Digital processing was the 'true villain' of typewriter manufacturing.